Showtime turns local writer's first book into series

Martin Kihn, surrounded by dogs and readers, at the Bookcase in Wayzata. Photo by Linda White

"House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time" might not sound exactly like something that would make a great TV show.

But it's not self-help, or even a business book--it's a memoir, and one that is, according to Publishers Weekly, highly intelligent and deeply funny. The author is Martin Kihn, who recently moved out here from New York and is currently making the rounds of local bookstores promoting his latest memoir, "Bad Dog (A Love Story)." (Read the Star Tribune review here.)

But "House of Lies," his first memoir, is currently in production in Hollywood as a pilot series for Showtime, to be aired beginning in January of next year. The memoir is about Kihn's career as a management consultant--a profession that Kihn maintains is "a shell game, imparting an air of authority and expertise rather than actual authority and expertise," one in which "legions of Harvard MBAs in Oxford shirts" dispense "reams of incomprehensible blather presented as winning corporate wisdom," PW says.

I've not seen the book, which pubbed in 2006, but it will be conveniently re-issued in November so that you can bone up before the show begins.